


Bewildering Evenings

by ElladoraRedbeard



Series: Coming over [11]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Confused Greg Lestrade, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Sherlock Holmes/Greg Lestrade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:53:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27335971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElladoraRedbeard/pseuds/ElladoraRedbeard
Summary: Greg was enjoying a football-match at home when Sherlock stalked in, in clear agitation.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/Greg Lestrade
Series: Coming over [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/450175
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	Bewildering Evenings

Greg was enjoying a quiet evening at home. He wasn't on call, and he didn't have any urgent work. He was waiting on several lab results, but until they got in, he couldn't proceed with any of his open cases. Initially his plan had been to go out to the pub to watch the Arsenal-Manchester United match, but he wasn't in the mood for company, besides, any match between those two would undoubtedly get the pub riled up, and he really wasn't in the mood for that.

So he was enjoying the match at home with a beer and some fish and chips he had picked up on his way home. It had been a few weeks since he had an evening off and he was planning to make it an early evening. The match would be finished by 10 p.m. at the latest so he was looking forward to actually being able to go to sleep at a decent hour for once.

Greg jumped as his front door slammed open. Sherlock stalked in, clearly enraged by something. So much for his quiet evening. Not that he really minded the man coming over.

"Sherlock? What's wrong?"

Sherlock ignored him and started pacing in front of the telly. Greg tried asking him again, but the other man kept on ignoring him.

"Oi! If you're not going to say what you're so worked up about, at least stop pacing in front of the telly so I can watch the Gunners."

Sherlock shot a look at the telly. "They're loosing."

"I'm aware." Grumbling, Greg stood up to get another beer from his fridge. If Sherlock was planning on being difficult tonight, he'd definitely need a few more. By the time he got back from the kitchen Sherlock had sat down on his couch, still wearing his ridiculous coat, arms wrapped around his pulled up legs.

"If you want to talk about it, talk. Otherwise I'm going to watch the match and going to bed after."

Sherlock didn't say anything but hunched further into himself. Suppressing the worry he was feeling until after the match, the man wouldn't talk until he was ready, Greg sat back with his beer and turned his attention back to the telly where Arsenal was indeed losing.

After the match was over, with Arsenal having lost, Greg turned to Sherlock, seating himself sideways, so he could properly observe the man, who hadn't moved from his position.

"You staying then?"

Sherlock nodded.

"You want to talk?"

Sherlock shrugged, and Greg rolled his eyes at him, sometimes the other man really was a petulant child. It looked like this would be turning into a guessing game. Luckily he had been dealing with a non-verbal Sherlock for years. And he wasn't as stupid as Sherlock sometimes made him out to be.

Greg turned his full attention to the other man, trying to deduce what was wrong, using the methods he had learned from watching Sherlock all these years.

The most obvious reason Sherlock could be agitated was John, but John was fine. If the doctor was hurt Sherlock would either be at the hospital with the other man, chasing down the people responsible for hurting John or he'd have called Greg to wherever it was that the two of them had gotten in trouble. The two flatmates also weren't fighting, because if they had been fighting Sherlock would have been ranting about the fight as soon as he came in. So not John.

It wasn't Mycroft either, because Sherlock reacted the same way he did with Mycroft as he did with John. Despite Sherlock's many protests otherwise, his behaviour indicated that he cared about his brother a lot. As much as he cared about John. Though he'd sulk up a storm if big brother meddled.

No, Sherlock was rattled. The fact that he was curled up into himself instead of his usual sprawl, indicated enough. And Greg knew of only one person that could rattle Sherlock.

Well two, but it had been a while since they had heard from Moriarty.

So the woman it was.

"What did the woman do?"

Sherlock looked up in surprise. "You really aren't as stupid as I sometimes make you out to be, are you?"

Greg rolled his eyes again, trust the man to only be capable of backhanded compliments.

"Nope."

Sherlock sighed, obviously not knowing where to begin and Greg decided to help him out.

"You knew she wasn't dead, didn't you?"

Sherlock looked surprised again and Greg smirked at him. He liked that he was able to surprise Sherlock sometimes, it would keep the younger man from becoming bored with him.

"Yeah, I knew. But how did you know I knew?"

Greg smirked again. "Because I know you, Sherlock. If you really thought she was dead you'd be tearing London to pieces to find the person responsible. You didn't, so ergo, she wasn't dead."

"Huh, not even Mycroft realised I knew."

"Yes, well, your brother has a major blind spot where you're concerned." Greg was perfectly aware that Sherlock was also aware of this, and exploited it often enough, though not nearly as much as he had when he was still using.

"So she wasn't dead. What happened then?"

"She 'revealed' herself to me. Asking for her phone back, that she had left in my possession on Christmas Eve."

"The present on the mantelpiece that you picked up before went into your bedroom?"

"Yes. The phone was what made me think that she was dead in the first place. Which is why we cut the Christmas celebration short. I genuinely thought she was dead until I saw the body."

"But it wasn't her."

"No, it would have fooled me, if Adler hadn't let me see her naked."

Greg choked on the beer he was just taking a sip off. "Naked?" He coughed out, determinedly ignoring the jealous feeling in his gut at all the scenarios where it was likely that Sherlock would have seen the woman naked. He definitely ignored the possibility that Sherlock had had sex with her.

When his airways had cleared from the beer he had inhaled, he looked up to see Sherlock staring at him in confusion.

"Yeah, didn't John tell you? She was naked when we first met. It was how I figured out the code to her safe, her measurements."

"Oh. Weird." Greg fought to keep the relief from his face, besides it was still quite possible Sherlock had had sex with her.

"Yeah, it was, didn't expect it at all, though very much in character for her."

"So she revealed herself not to be dead. When was this?"

"New Year's Eve. Before the burglar broke in at Baker Street. Or well, during him breaking in. When I got back from her reveal, I found the burglar holding Mrs. Hudson at gunpoint. I saw the guy this evening again, apparently he was working with Mycroft all this time."

Greg bristled, he couldn't believe Mycroft sometimes, deliberately endangering his little brother, and Mrs. Hudson.

"Oh, calm down, Detective Inspector. Mycroft wasn't aware that the man had broken in and since then he has the man on a very short leash."

"Alright. Why did he break in?"

"To get the phone. When I first met her, she told me that the phone was her life, her protection. Apparently she had pictures, state secrets, scandals and other information on it, which could prove to be either very valuable or very destructive in the wrong hands."

"Did they get it?"

"No, so I spent the next few months trying to unlock it. I had four tries to get the password, but after the first fail I X-rayed it, discovering she had explosives in the casing, so breaking it open wouldn't be an option. Plus I suspected that if I failed four times, the explosives would go off."

Greg marvelled again at Sherlock's genius. It would never have occurred to him to X-ray the phone, he'd have just tried to break it open, and would have probably ended up with burns on his hands, or worse.

"Earlier today I found her in my bed after John and I came home from another case." Greg once again had to ignore the jealous feeling in his gut, so he got up to get a glass of water for the other man and a third beer for himself.

After the detective emptied the glass, he continued. "She told me there were killers after her because she had acquired something that was more dangerous than she had first suspected. She needed me to help her figure it out. So I gave her a duplicate of her phone, to try and trick her into giving me the code, but she figured out that it wasn't hers. I gave her the actual phone and she showed me a picture of an email she had been show by an MOD-man. It contained information about a plane that was to depart from Heathrow tomorrow night."

"Was to depart? It's not going to depart any longer?" Greg was picking at the label on his beer bottle.

Sherlock shook his head. "No, decoding the email was a mistake. I had overheard Mycroft talking about the flight a few months earlier, not that I had known at the time, but I figured it out, well some of it anyway. The flight was a ruse, Mycroft had filled the plane up with the dead bodies of people who had died over the last couple of months, because there had been chatter about terrorists bombing that flight. But they couldn't let on about how they had overheard the chatter, so the plane would be flown by remote control and blow up mid-air. The mission would be accomplished for the terrorists. Hundreds of casualties, but nobody dies. Elegant solution, really."

"Yeah, it really is. So why isn't it flying any longer?"

"Because Adler is working with Moriarty."

"Shit." Greg cursed vehemently, no wonder Sherlock was rattled if Moriarty was involved.

"Hmm, quite." Sherlock sighed. "Mycroft had me picked up then, bringing me to the plane and proceeded to berate me for my mistake." Greg winced, he knew how much Sherlock craved his big brother's approval, no matter how much he denied it.

"Then Adler turned up. She blackmailed Mycroft to give into her demands for protection and other requests I'm not aware off. Otherwise she'd be contacting his superiors that I'm his biggest security leak."

Sherlock took Greg's beer then, and emptied it. "Mycroft tried to negotiate, but she wouldn't give. Next, she revealed she had been helped by Moriarty. And that he had given a lot of advice on how to play us."

"Jesus. That man is a menace."

Sherlock looked up at Greg then, and the DI could have sworn that there was a fleeting smile at that. Though it didn't negate the sadness in Sherlock's eyes.

"She made a mistake then."

"Oh?" Greg said in surprise, he'd thought the situation to be hopeless, though he should have known better with Sherlock involved.

"Or rather, she made a mistake earlier and what she said made me realise it.

"'Moriarty didn't even ask for anything.' She said. 'I think he just likes to cause trouble. Now _that's_ my kind of man.'" Sherlock quoted.

Greg frowned in confusion at the other man who rolled his eyes.

"I don't get it."

"Sentiment, Lestrade! She got carried away, made the game too elaborate. She tried to deny it of course, but I took her pulse earlier. And I figured it out. I figured _her_ out."

Sherlock went into the kitchen, leaving Greg in bewilderment, when he came back he had a pen and paper. He sat down next to Greg again, bending over the coffee table and when he sat up again Greg could see what he had written.

I AM

____

LOCKED

"This was what her lock-screen looked like. And because she made the mistake of bringing her heart into it, she lost everything she ever worked for."

"Still don't ..." Greg started to say, but he trailed off as Sherlock started filling in the blanks on the paper.

I AM

SHER

LOCKED

"Oh." Her heart, Sherlock said. The woman was in love with Sherlock. And he had figured it out by taking her pulse. Greg shuddered to think that he was as easy to figure out as her by Sherlock.

"Sentiment, Lestrade." The detective threw his head back onto the headrest. "Why did she bring sentiment into it? She was _so close_."

Sherlock jumped up and started pacing again, the calm he had regained by sitting quietly next to Greg on his couch was lost.

"Sherlock." Greg's gut was playing up, something was wrong.

"Sentiment is a chemical defect found on the losing side, Lestrade. She gave me the final proof tonight, that love is a dangerous disadvantage."

"Sherlock." Very, very wrong.

Suddenly Sherlock stood very still, not looking at Greg, seemingly lost in thought.

"I have to go." Sherlock said, barely glancing at Greg.

"Goodbye." The man said, and he left, leaving Greg sitting in bewilderment at what had just happened.

Bewilderment and strangely bereft.

Greg had the feeling he had just lost something very important, and he didn't even know how.

**Author's Note:**

> So this took an unexpected turn. I really didn't mean to confuse poor Greg this much, but I promise they will get together in the end. Eventually.


End file.
